You can soon, if you insist, talk to your microwave — and it will listen. Amazon recently announced a $60 voice-activated microwave, along with 10 other new products using its Alexa voice assistant. via Pocket

Today’s internet is bland. Everything looks the same: generic fonts, no layouts to speak of, and an absence of expressive visuals. So I asked my students to redesign it, and here’s what they created. via Pocket

You may be thinking: But sand is everywhere, there are whole deserts filled with the stuff. The sand in a desert, though, is useless as a construction material. The grains are out in the open and blow around for thousands of years. via Pocket

It was 1924 when the 12-year-old boy was brought to the Moscow clinic for an evaluation. By all accounts, he was different from his peers. Other people did not interest him much, and he preferred the company of adults to that of children his own age. via Pocket

For a while now researchers at MIT and several other universities have been investigating methods for using frequencies in the WiFi bands to see through walls using a form of low power radar. The basic concept is to track and process the reflections of these signals from peoples bodies. Recently researchers at MIT have taken this idea a step further, combining the radar results with machine learning in a project they call RF-Pose. The result is the ability to recreate and track full human post i

SAN FRANCISCO — Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of Android mobile software, a hero’s farewell when he left the company in October 2014. What Google did not make public was that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin of sexual misconduct. The woman, with whom Mr. via Pocket

EDITOR’S PREFACE: Thanks to a recommendation from my friend MaxR at Metal Bandcamp, I discovered an article written by veteran musician Matt Harvey of California’s Exhumed that he posted at the Exhumed blog (here) in late August. It consists of reflections about the evolution of death metal, as he has witnessed it, over the more [...]

Just as responsive web design closed the gap between desktop and mobile sites a few years ago, progressive web app techniques are currently closing the gap between the web and the app world. via Pocket

Stop installing Tensorflow using pip! Use conda instead. If you don’t know what conda is, it’s an open source package and environment management system that runs cross-platform. So it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. via Pocket

This is Rongzhong from Pittsburgh. Eight months after my first post on OpenCat, I have quite a lot to update. Most importantly, I’m going to launch my first kitten on Indiegogo on Monday, Oct 22nd! The kitten’s name is Nybble. Links will be posted here, on my twitter @PetoiCamp, or on Petoi.com. via Pocket

As Apple continues to fight independent repair, Motorola has partnered with iFixit and pledged to support the right to repair movement. From a report: It is excellent news that Motorola has decided to make it as easy as possible for you to repair your phone. The company announced that it would begin selling replacement parts for all of its recent phones to customers, and it has partnered with iFixit to sell repair kits for phones like the Moto X, Z, G4, G5, and Droid Turbo 2. The kits come with tools, genuine Motorola-branded replacement parts, and instructions on how to fix your device. iFixit is currently selling replacement batteries, screens, and digitizer assemblies. "Motorola is setting an example for major manufacturers to embrace a more open attitude towards repair," iFixit wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership. "For fixers like us, this partnership is representative of a broader movement in support of our Right to Repair. It's proof that OEM manufacturers and independent repair can co-exist. Big business and social responsibility, and innovation and sustainability, don't need to be mutually exclusive."

Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game tear. From a report: "The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tournament. [It's] truly an honor to pass the torch to the new generation of Tetris players." The veteran stood on stage holding a silver trophy, his first since losing to Harry Hong in 2014, and the unlikely Saelee, tears still in his eyes, hoisted the gold to applause from the crowd at Sunday's Retro Game Expo crowd. Though Tetris came out on the NES in 1989, the Classic World Championship tournament as it exists today didn't get started until 2010 after the game's competitive scene spent most of the aughts trading strategies, high scores, and footage evidence throughout a scattered network of forums and websites. Now, top players from around the world compete annually at the Expo using the original game and controllers played on old CRTs to see who can get the highest score in individual head-to-head matchups.

This project is a Redis module that implements a graph database. Nodes in the graph represent entities such as persons or places, and connections such as 'visit' are made between the different entities. via Pocket

Recently, we quietly open-sourced a key part of FontStruct’s font-generation module. It’s a very basic TrueType font-generation library called fonthx and it’s written in Haxe. This is FontStruct’s first open-source contribution. via Pocket

Django (/ˈdʒæŋɡoʊ/ jang-goh) is a free, open source web application framework written in Python. Here you can find a tutorial from Django, if you don't know it yet and want to try it out: https://ift.tt/2NLx1O7. via Pocket

Jailbreaking iOS getting harder with every new version released, repacking and resigning iOS applications to be sideloaded on non-jailbroken iOS device has been a subject that has generated significant interest from security researchers in recent years. via Pocket

Former KYUSS frontman John Garcia returns with his next incarnation of Desert Rock, JOHN GARCIA AND THE BAND OF GOLD. The group's self-titled debut album will be released on January 4, 2019 via Napalm. via Pocket

Complexity is the most important challenge in software development. So it is important to always strive to eliminate complexity. But sometimes we worship complexity - and that can make complexity problems unsolvable.

Software development is not really about programming. Anybody can write a ten-line program. The true challenge are complex systems. If a system is so large that a single person alone cannot understand it and develop it further, concepts such as modularization are crucial. via Pocket

One month after the French channel port of Dunkirk introduced free public transport for all, a small revolution is taking place. Two women, perfect strangers until now, are chatting across the aisle about nothing in particular. One admits she sometimes takes the bus “just for the fun of it”. via Pocket

This is a server that lets users convert any RSS feed to an ActivityPub actor that can be followed by users on ActivityPub-compliant social networks like Mastodon. For a demo of this in action, see https://ift.tt/2RSeEcP This requires Node.js v10.10.0 or above. via Pocket